The Burdens That Standards Bring--Roger Dickeson

Be careful what you wish for. Your wish might be granted. At this moment, many people involved in printing are wishing for, and spending time and money promoting, digital and specification standards for our industry. I wouldn't dare suggest that they do otherwise lest I be charged with denigrating the flag, motherhood and apple pie. What I dare to remind all well-intentioned parties is that there are tyrannies imposed by the deadly legacies that standards often become.

Prime example: the inch, foot, yard and acre are standards in the United States. Try, just try, to change to the metric measure standard in use by most of the rest of the modern world. We've tried and failed to change to a system that is far more effective. We are slaves of a legacy growing out of the measure of some ancient king's arm from nose to finger tip. We suffer a gallon of gas, a quart of milk, a pound of paper, miles per hour rather than kilometers, Fahrenheit rather than Centigrade temperature measures, and we have to instruct our calculators and computers to round off any conversion calculations beyond X decimal points.

Consider the operating system in use by 90 percent of the world's microcomputers. Back in 1980, Microsoft developed an operating system based on a measure of Bill Gates' arm from nose to fingertip or some such. By achieving a marketing critical mass, it became the de facto standard. Now we, and Microsoft, are stuck with it because of the thousands of applications, industries and businesses that are dependent on MS DOS and its bastard child Windows.

Besides "standards" and "legacies" there are other like words we use such as "paradigms," "cultures" and "metaphors." All of these terms deal with efforts to achieve a uniformity that, in time, becomes a constraint on change. Measures, operating systems, languages and theologies—all are efforts to impose disciplines on human behavior and thinking. In so doing they make it difficult to advance with improvements in technology and thought.